“This is For Everyone” by Tim Berners-Lee
The groundbreaking memoir from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This is the story of our modern age.
The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee famously shared his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything, transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream and connect.
In this intimate memoir, Berners-Lee tells the story of his iconic invention, exploring how it launched a new era of creativity and collaboration while unleashing a commercial race that today imperils democracies and polarizes public debate. As the rapid development of artificial intelligence heralds a new era of innovation, Berners-Lee provides the perfect guide to the crucial decisions ahead – and a gripping, in-the-room account of the rise of the online world.
Filled with Sir Tim’s characteristic optimism, technical insight and wry humour, this is a book about the power of technology – both to fuel our worst instincts and to profoundly shape our lives for the better. This Is for Everyone is an essential read for understanding our times and a bold manifesto for advancing humanity’s future.
While he spends a fair bit in the book discussing the invention of the web and the necessity of invention, to help the computers and scientists working at European Organization for Nuclear Research or as it was previously known, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) to co-ordinate their work. It is the last one-third of the book that is particularly fascinating as he reflects upon the impact of the internet on humanity – the fact today nearly 5.5 billion people are using it or relying upon it. This, despite nearly 60% of the links on it are defunct. Nevertheless, the importance of the web cannot be emphasized enough. He witnesses the growth of the tech firms and their increasing evaluation. But to his mind, the original premise of releasing the WWW for free was that it was for everyone and it was enriched by a collaborative experience between many individuals. To concentrate information and content on a few tech platforms is not correct. Hence, he created the concept of Solid, a web decentralization project developed collaboratively at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy by developing a platform for linked-data applications that are completely decentralized and fully under users’ control rather than controlled by other entities. The ultimate goal of Solid is to allow users to have full control of their own data, including access control and storage location. The digital wallet, or a pod, that would enable every individual to have control over their rights to all digital content and related material. Tim Berners-Lee established a company called Inrupt to help build a commercial ecosystem to fuel Solid. He also in the last section of the book reflect upon Artificial Intelligence (AI) and that is where this book extract published on Moneycontrol has been taken from.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland. Since then, through his work with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), The Open Data Institute and the World Wide Web Foundation he has been a tireless advocate for shared standards, open web access for all and the power of individuals on the web. A firm believer in the positive power of technology, he was named in Time magazine’s list of the most important people of the 20th century.
9 Sept 2025
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